Frank and Ben debate whether or not the upgraded firmware for the PS3 has the …

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After a brief hiatus, The Saturday Sunday Showdown continues. Each week we pick a topic, flip a coin to see which OT writer gets which side to debate, and then we present it to you. This week? Whether or not the PS3's ever-evolving firmware-powered feature list is going to be enough to increase sales.

Ben: My skepticism of the PS3 as a viable platform has become something of a running joke with Opposable Thumbs readers. With the initial release of the system, it was hard to take Sony's claims seriously. I kept asking myself, "You want this to be a media hub?" in the first few months of the system's release. This? PlayStation 2 games didn't look great, Blu-ray didn't work in 720p. It took forever to download anything, and you couldn't do anything else while you were pulling the files down. What a difference a few firmware updates make! Now the Blu-ray player works beautifully in 720p, PS2 and PSone games get upscaled up to 1080p, streaming media is a snap, background downloading works fine, and there is even some great content to download! We all knew that the system would get better, but with the newest firmware update, it's like a magic trick: the system Sony always wanted to release is now in our home theaters. Is this a selling point? Of course it is, as the games are getting better, and the promises Sony made us are finally bearing fruit. I never told friends and family that buying a PS3 was a good idea before because I'm loathe to pay for potential. Now I can get excited about what the system can do RIGHT NOW.

Frank: Firmware updates (and patches) are both a blessing and a curse this time around. While these big updates can allow the developers to fix old problems and implement new functionalities, we can already see a trend of "half-finished" product releases that are simply "buffed out" later. Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 suffer from this: they came out with a certain amount of functionality and a certain set of problems, and issues were ironed out over time. Don't get me wrong; I love the fact that the problems that arise via user feedback can be remedied. However, the problem that Sony faces is that they are repeating the same mistakes that Microsoft had already addressed; they learned nothing from the 360's failures. The background downloading, for one, should have shipped with the PS3. It's good that they finally patched it in, but why did it take so long? The same goes for the upscaling and some of the other fixes in the recent patch: the system is only getting around to having functionality it should have had already rather than new functionality worth reconsidering the unit for. Thus, it's hard to look at these firmware upgrades as anything other than Sony racing to try and match functionality already evident on other units at a lower price.

Ben: So what? If you're a customer today and you have $600 in your greasy mitts, do you care if these things should have been there when the system shipped? Of course not. If you have a nice display and a good sound system, you're happy that they'll be so ably supported by the PS3 right now. Early adopters know the pain they're getting into, and so many gamers I talk to say that they want a PS3 but are waiting for certain features. Well, those features are finally coming; I know many who are now going to take the plunge. Sure, it's an expensive system, and while value-added things like the Blu-ray drive don't interest everyone, for A/V fiends they're huge. The PS3 is one of the cheapest Blu-ray players out there and with the additions of 720p play and improving options for how to display the image via HDMI, it's also one of the best. With this new firmware update, the system and Blu-ray play is functional enough to finally make it a selling point. If you took games away altogether, the other things (Blu-ray, media streaming, and 60GB hard drive) are a good value for $600. When the usage of these things was so hobbled, they were almost useless to many people. But now the PS3 is a very strong set top box at a very compelling price. I think we're going to see a sales spike in sales over the next month.

Frank: Right, but here's the thing. I'm a consumer, and I'm seeing that one unit—the 360—has a considerably more advanced feature set that encompasses everything that the PS3 boasts and more. I know that the patches are going to continue to come and that the competition's unit will have increasingly advanced functionality, while the PS3 is still catching up to the 360's already-established abilities. Unless Sony goes above and beyond somehow or approaches it from a different angle, then I don't see how the firmware can really push me to pick up a PS3 instead of something else. You're right in pin-pointing early adopters as the main benefactors of these updates, but really, on paper these new functionalities just level the playing field. If all you were really interested in was the PS3's media-playing capabilities, you were probably going to pick one up from before this patch anyway. No one, 360 fan or otherwise, has ever complained that the PS3 wasn't a capable media player and a worthwhile Blu-ray player. Yes, the 720p functionality helps, and might have been a deal-breaker to some before. But I hardly think that there will be a rush of sales now from the subset of users who wanted a 720p experience—especially given that most have probably already moved on to something else.

So what do you think? Can firmware be the ultimate boon to PS3 sales, or are these extra features simply too little, too late?